I’m still in Paris, working hard on the Magicens de la Terre conference. This week we heard paper presentations on a variety of subjects relating to the concept of global exhibitions and Magiciens de la Terre. The subject of the presentations included Latin America as situated between West and non-West, The Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts 1955 and the “non- aligned” artists, Gu Dexin and extended tactility through visual and olfactory qualities of the work, Congo contemporary artworks, Alfredo Jaar, The Anthropocene Project, and outsider artists in Japan.
Speakers
This week we were joined by speakers including Andrea Buddensieg, curator and director of GAM – Global Art and the Museum at ZKM/ Karlsruhe, and Professor Monica Juneja, of the Karl Jaspers Centre, Heidelberg University.Discussions continued about the original Magiciens de la Terre project relating to how the work was conceived and delivered. According to Jean Hubert Martin, the point of magiciens was to problematise the relationship between anthropology and art through exploring the paradoxes and contradictions of reappropriation. The idea was to change Western viewpoints of art production, although the idea of ‘Western’ as a problematic term didn’t seem to figure as part of the conceptualisation.
The exhibition archive from the original Magicien de la Terre show was useful in showing the travelling notes produced in an ethnographic style by curators when visiting artists. These ‘mission reports’ detailed the objectives of studio visits and include letters written to representatives in different countries, showing the network of artistic and curatorial contacts. However, despite their intentions of producing a ‘global exhibition’, not all areas were able to be included. These were explained as mostly pragmatic decisions, specifically due to lack of documentation, contacts or money.
Discussions
As part of our daily discussions around the different themes and paper presentations, we were able to question the original curators about how they felt their intentions for the exhibition were received and how they dealt with the criticisms of the show. The aim was to present the artists as individual maker and emblematic of Modernity. However, based on the works chosen, artists from outside ‘Western’ cultural centres appeared to be more specifically representative of particular aspects of cultural production. I felt that this created a tension and an ambiguity in the way that artists were treated which undermined the concept of the exhibition.
As described by Pablo La Fuente in ‘Making Art Global’, the decision to treat each of the artists as individual makers was seen as a generally positive move away from the ‘nameless’ artefacts displayed alongside Modernist ‘masterpieces’ in the 1985 MOMA exhibition, ‘Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’. However, such a decision can also be decontextualising, severing connections to cultural threads of artistic interpretation and knowledge, as well as further denying the impact of cultural context on the production of ‘Western’ artworks. (La Fuente, 2014, p18)
Production of retrospective
As well as the inclusion of images and other documents from the archive in the retrospective exhibition, there were also audio visual elements which captured aspects of the production of the work. In particular, Sarkis was asked to leave four holes in the wall works for documentary videos to be projected. These space were labelled with Jean-Hubert Martin’s name and showed clips of artwork being produced, many of it by African artists. When questioned about the possibility of the videos exoticising the artists in question he replied that by showing production of artworks by non western artists he felt was giving more exposure and advantage to these artists over more established artists.
Experiences
Overall I felt that the experience was informative and challenging, allowing me to learn more about the Magiciens exhibition and to meet other researchers in my field. As the conference took place in the gallery spaces, we became active participants in the exhibition space. This was a point of contention for some of the participants who felt that we were being displayed as a spectacle in much the same way as the original artworks. Personally, I enjoyed being a part of the exhibition, and it seemed that the ‘objectification’ of the participants was an overlooked and unintended consequence of the format that would be addressed in any future versions of the project.
Before attending the conference, I’d felt that I needed to present my work in a more ‘academic’ style but after talking to the other participants, I realised that they were quite excited by the prospect of listening to an artist present their practice, so I decided to take that on board for the next time I present. They were also keen to see examples of my work and I even had a meeting with the artists book librarian at Centre Pompidou.
Our legacy in the retrospective exhibition was the journal that we produced while we were there, which documented our responses to the archive and continued to be distributed throughout the exhibition after we had left. The journal is also held in the Bibliotheque Kandinsky collection.
Further info:
http://monoskop.org/Information_%281970_exhibition%29
http://www.biennialfoundation.org/biennials/biennial-of-graphic-arts-slovenia
http://www.artnetweb.com/oldenburg/entropic.html
http://africandigitalart.com/2012/10/reassemblage-from-the-firelight-to-the-screen
http://www.ihabhassan.com/postmodernism_to_postmodernity.htm
www.mcgill.ca/files/crclaw-discourse/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf
SubTerrain: Artworks in the Cityfold
Memory, Metaphor, Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan
The Global Contemporary: Artworlds after 1989
